All These Movies Will Vanish From Netflix Tomorrow

For Netflix subscribers, tonight may seem like the last night on earth. That's because more than 840 movies from Starz will vanish from the Netflix library on Wednesday, leaving the service without its premier source of first-run movies.

For Netflix subscribers, tonight may seem like the last night on Earth. That's because more than 840 movies from Starz will vanish from the Netflix library on Wednesday, leaving the service without its premier source of first-run movies.

(In an email exchange Tuesday, a Netflix spokesman said that the deal would end, and Netflix would stop showing the Netflix content, at the "end of February". On Wednesday, the spokesman corrected himself: "End of February in a non-leap year.")

Netflix could also strike a last-minute deal or deals to save some of the movies before they disappear from its service.

So what movies do you need to prioritize tonight, before they vanish? Fortunately, TVandMoviesNow has a list of all them, prioritized by user rating. In other words, if your son wants to watch Toy Story 3, tonight's the last night to do so before he'll have to accompany you to the video store. Ditto for Tangled, Howl's Moving Castle, Secretariat, and the popular TV series "Spartacus" and "Party Down."

TVandMoviesNow has also helpfully listed the Starz movies that are also available on the Amazon Prime service, including Toy Story 3, Patton, and Warren Miller: Children of Winter. But the comparison also shows what quality programming Starz added to the Netflix lineup, and what shows Amazon lacks.

In October, Netflix said Starz content accounts for 6 percent of its viewing hours via Watch Instantly; when Showtime was still available, that number was at 10 percent. Netflix spun these stats to say that "Netflix has about 10 times the streaming content selection of full Starz, in terms of what consumers actually choose to watch."

Netflix has pledged to use the money it set aside for Starz content on other licensing deals.

Still, Netflix isn't doing that poorly. Netflix added 600,000 domestic members in the fourth quarter to reach 24.4 million, the company said in a january letter to shareholders. That's not as much as its pre-scandal July high of 24.6 million subscribers, but it's an improvement from the 21.4 million it reported in October as annoyed customers ditched the service.

Most of last quarter's additions were to the Watch Instantly streaming platform. Netflix added 220,000 streaming customers this quarter for a total of 21.67 million, helped by gift subscriptions handed out over the holidays. That, according to CEO Reed Hastings and CFO David Wells, was a "faster than expected" recovery.

Editor's Note: The timing of the Starz deal was erroneously stated in a previous version of the story, due to information provided by a Netflix spokesman. The story has been updated to correct the timing of the termination of the deal, which ended at 12:59 PM on Feb. 28.

Mark Hachman Mark joined ExtremeTech in 2001 as the news editor, after rival CMP/United Media decided at the time that online news did not make sense in the new millennium.
Mark stumbled into his career after discovering that writing the great American novel did not pay a monthly salary, and that his other possible career choice, physics, required a degree of mathematical prowess that he sorely lacked.
Mark talked his way into a freelance assignment at CMP’s Electronic Buyers’ News, in 1995, where he wrote the...
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